(2021) The Colorist Orchestra & Howe Gelb - Not On the Map


Review:
This collaboration between Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb and the pop/chamber music collective known as is both spare and lavish. Its intricate rhythms are played on a wide array of both actual percussion instruments and household implements pressed into musical service, tracing prickly, staccato cadences across swooning strings. The music, written by Gelb but reimagined and rearranged by the Orchestra’s leaders Aarich Jespers and Kobe Proesmans, has a bit of Giant Sand’s Western swagger, its Latin romance, its tango-rhythmed stops and starts, but also something close to contemporary classical sound.  Think So Percussion in a cowboy hat. Gelb’s lyrics are, per usual, surreal and evocative. He mutters the words to “Dr. Goldman” in his cracked baritone, lush patterns of violin, reed instruments and jungle sounds springing up in the long pauses between phrases. The song is feverish, lurid, elliptical, suggesting the outlines of a story about wildlife, extinction and the limits of scientific knowledge. A little googling reveals that Dr. Goldman is the scientist who used camera traps to document the existence of the Zanzibar leopard, long thought to be extinct. Knowing the backstory makes the song a bit less cryptic, but even so it pulses with heat and mystery. Gelb’s long-time collaborator Pieta Brown sings on a handful of songs. Her own “Sweet Pretender,” is fluid and country dulcet, but also gets a transformation from the Colorist Crew. By the end, its engaging melody has run into a buzz saw of hard rhythms and distortion, roughing it up and upending expectations. Still to get at the magic of putting Gelb’s songs in Colorist hands, you have to look to “More Exes.” It begins dryly, laconically, with Gelb chanting in monotone over an undulating bed of jazz bass, Latin rhythms and tremulous violins. It blossoms into melody at the chorus, Gelb singing with Brown, then cuts back to its swaying, clopping rhythm. The wordplay is clever, as always, but not showy about it, fluttering from romantic exes to exes in tic tac toe with hardly a raised eyebrow. — dusted





Track Listing:
01 - Counting On
02 - Gentle On My Mind
03 - Sometimes I Wish (feat. Pieta Brown)
04 - Dr Goldman
05 - Thyne Eyes
06 - Sweet Pretender (feat. Pieta Brown)
07 - Ruin Everything (feat. Pieta Brown)
08 - Tarantula
09 - More Exes (feat. Pieta Brown)
10 - Not On the Map


Media Report:
Genre: chamber pop, indie-pop
Country: Belgium
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits